I went around all of the cabinets and recorded every model in them!

There might have been the odd one missing, but this basically shows the whole competition. I go over some of the rules, rule changes, categories and general feel of the Golden Demon.

Video – Golden Demon Adepticon 2024

My thoughts on Golden Demon Adepticon 2024

When I say all of them, I had to go in and record this at one o’clock in the morning just so I could get around the cabinets because if you don’t know, Adepticon is open 24 hours a day, which means that people are always around the cabinets, and I just went back in the morning because that was the only time I had access really, where there weren’t too many people to get in the way.

But when I recorded this, the majority of entries had been done. The cut-off point was at 10:00 AM the next morning, and I think maybe there was one or two entries that maybe slipped by. But apart from that, you know, this is all of the entries that were put in for the Golden Demon.

So it was kind of an interesting experience for me. This is the first of the American golden demons I’ve been to. I was planning to go to the one that happened just as Covid kicked off, and obviously that was cancelled. So it’s been a little while, and they’ve obviously had a few of the US golden demons since then. But this is, like I said, the first one that I’ve been to, so it was interesting to have that comparison to the UK Golden Demon, which is obviously something I’m very familiar with.

The scale of the competition overall is a lot smaller than a UK Golden Demon, but that’s not to say that the quality of the entries wasn’t high; it just means that there weren’t as many of them. Although also, having said that, there were quite a few international people entering, including myself. So it did seem very familiar to me, a lot of familiar faces, friends, that I obviously see during the UK Golden Demon anyway, so it was just kind of like, it was familiar, but a little bit different at the same time.

Noteworthy Tier? What is that?

The demon had changed a little bit from the last UK Golden Demon that I went to. So they have added a new tier, and it’s kind of interesting because what had happened before is the first cut would give you a green sticker on your little card next to your entry, and that meant that you would get a finalist pin. And the terminology is a little bit confusing because people would think a finalist pin would be for something that’s just before the trophies, but actually after finalist pin, you would get a commended entry, and it’s from the commended entry that you would select the winners.

And it’s also still true for this case, but because the finalist was the first cut as such, people were a little bit disappointed if they didn’t get the finalist pin because it was viewed as basically the, like, I don’t want to say the easy, but the very first thing, the first stage that you have to get by. And it was a case that sometimes there were quite a few finalist pins given out. I know at the previous US Golden Demon, that didn’t happen quite the same way.

So if you got a green sticker, it didn’t mean that you would get a finalist pin. It just, the green sticker was an indication that you’ve got through first cut. And the sad thing about that was because it was so familiar to everyone for if you’ve got a green sticker, you’ve got a finalist pin. When people went to collect their prizes and they’d got a green sticker on their card and then they were told they didn’t actually have a finalist pin, it could be a little bit frustrating. And I can imagine that, you know, people would be upset from that.

So in this Golden Demon, they added the new tier, which was the noteworthy tier, so that becomes just before finalist, but that doesn’t mean it’s not actually a lower tier. What the noteworthy award was, is actually a replacement for the previous finalist one. So that’s the new standard first cut, if you like. And then finalist is now a higher tier, and so there still aren’t as many finalist pins given out, so it’s a harder thing to get, but it also means that it’s a more attractive award because it is harder to get. I know before people have been a little bit like, because it was the first cut thing, it didn’t actually mean that much to them, whereas now, you have to actually get past the noteworthy stage.

How Have Finalist Pins Changed?

To get the finalist pin, because it’s harder to get now, actually it is quite satisfying to get to that level. And even, you know, to get the noteworthy thing, I think it’s especially nice for people that are starting off on their golden demon journey to have now more attainable targets as well. So after the finalist pin, you have the commended entry stage and the commended entry stage, you will get a certificate, a little card certificate, and I don’t really know why, but in the UK it would be a black card embossed with gold lettering. And in the US it’s a white card embossed with gold lettering, but it’s smaller than the UK one as well. It didn’t matter too much. I mean, it means the same things, but because of the new bump up in levels, there were fewer commended entries given out now. So it’s actually very hard to get a commended entry in this because basically if you are at commended entry level, you are a trophy level painter because, because of the way that golden demon is judged. So you have a gold, silver, and bronze, it doesn’t matter how good the quality of the painting is that it can only ever be a gold, silver, and bronze. And if say from the five commended entry in the category, they could all be Slayer or previous Slayer Sword winners, all of equal quality, it doesn’t matter. You’re still only gonna get the gold, silver, and bronze. So the idea with the commended entry is to show that, you know, this is a very high level of painting and basically you are a trophy level painter.

For the commended entries for this Golden Demon, they had pumped up the quality of it. So you didn’t just get a little certificate, which I kind of, I appreciated, but it didn’t feel quite as nice. I actually thought the finalist pin was more attractive because it’s a little like, sort of solid, like a little tiny trophy almost. Whereas, you know, to get commended, which is above finalist, you only got a piece of card, whereas this time the card came with a frame, so you get like a nice, uh, special frame that you mount the finalist card in, or not finalist the commanded card in, and it says like, Adepticon Golden Demon in 2024. So it actually feels like you’re getting a trophy this time, which I thought was really, really nice. And then obviously you have the standard gold de and gold, silver and bronze as well.

It feels now becoming more of like a hybrid kind of competition, which would be like a cross between open and then legacy style. So legacy would be, you know, just award in gold, silver, and bronze, and there’s only ever one of those in the category. Whereas the Open style is that as long as your painting is good enough, you tend to go to whatever level you are you’re at. So you can get multiple golds, multiple silvers, et cetera. And it’s purely dependent on the quality of your painting. It is a little bit now of a mix between the two, which I think is nice because, because Golden Demon is advancing all the time, it becomes harder and harder to get to those top three, as there are just more and more very high level painters and it’s almost becomes like a roll of the dice to get a trophy now.

Whereas to get through up to the commended level, it is more based on the quality of your painting. I mean, obviously the top three are based on quality of painting as well, but they, this, I think they tend to start looking for other things as well, just like how kind of cool or interesting, like what sort of story it tells or all sorts of things like that. This Golden Demon was also different because they tweaked the categories a little bit. So there’s been a little bit of discussion about this online, and I’m not all together convinced by some of the categories, but what they did was they combined dual and diorama into one category, which in the case of this Golden Demon, I don’t think was the correct decision because the, the, the joint category there actually had quite a lot of very high quality entries. And indeed the Slayer Sword winner was taken from that category. They also added a Horus Heresy category, and I’m a little bit in two minds on this one. And again, I was discussing this with a few people and my initial opinion was that the problem with the Horus Heresy category is that it, it covers everything. So you’ve got single models, vehicles, units, you’ve got like primarks in there as well. It’s the equivalent of taking everything in Warhammer 40,000, for separate categories and just putting it all into one category. But the response I got was, um, well, if they did that, how many models would be in each category? And in this case it would be, some of the categories would be virtually none. The Horus Heresy category was not very heavily entered, which I was a bit surprised about because it is quite a, a popular system. But I can understand the mishmash of the category could also put people off. So, you either have to accept that there was a Horus Heresy category, and you’re gonna have some weird comparisons between the entrants in the categories for that specific category, anyway. So you have to accept that, or you just have to completely take away the category and have those models spread because anything that’s Horus Heresy could basically go into the Warhammer 40,000 equivalent. So you’ve got like the unit, single model vehicle and monster type things. They would fit into those fine. I think the only argument is that the other categories tend to be dominated more by the Warhammer 40,000 models because it’s a much bigger system.

New Underworlds Category

There was an underworlds category, and that was kind of interesting. There weren’t that many entries for it, but the actual, the general standard of those was pretty high. Uh, but they also had this, um, weird system where it was, you could enter either a single model or a unit. So again, the, the, the judging, I’m not entirely sure how it works out where you judge a single model against a unit because the quality of the painting, a single model is very focused in its painting, whereas a unit is painted to be, um, very much viewed as a unit. So the unit you judge the on how well it works as a unit and not just as an individual model. Whereas a single model is judged purely as an individual model. So I think that was a little bit of a weird thing to do. I think it would have been better to have a separate, single model and unit category or just pick one or the other and have like separate awards for them, or a sub award for the top single model and the top unit in that category, and then have an overall winner, which could be a single model or unit.

But there were some great models in there and it was, it was quite nice to see the variation of styles and models that people entered into the Underworlds category. And I think this will be something that people, you know, if they give it a go, you might find that you do quite well in it because it’s a very specific system and people might not have as high expectations for it as other categories. So, you might be in with a chance if you paint well enough. There was also a titan category, which I found a little bit strange because the titans don’t tend to be as highly detailed as say the Warhammer 40,000 scale models because they’re a lot bigger and they tend to be more just like large flat areas that are sort of like basically base coats. So you don’t tend to see as much like freehand or, or shading or anything like that on the titan models. It was also difficult because the titans are a big model, so they tend to be a big entry fee as well. So I think that also puts people off entering that category, so it wasn’t as heavily subscribed to.

There was also a bust category, which I think is a nice addition because again, there are some really cool bust models out there that people might not enter because they just wouldn’t fit into a different category. Then you also had the standard single model and unit categories as well. All in all, it was, it was a good show, with a good spread of categories and a good spread of entries as well.

I was pleased that I managed to pick up a, a commended entry in one of my categories in this Golden Demon. I think the tweaks that they’ve made to the Golden Demon system are, are largely positive and the more people that can achieve success in the system, the better, because it does get people to try to paint at a higher level. If people have got something to aim for that’s, that’s more attainable, I think they’re more likely to try and go for it.

The FAQ – Where did it go wrong?

So the release of a frequently asked questions was kind of really important to get right. And I think Games Workshop dropped the ball a little bit on not getting that out. Because the problem is when you have to spend hundreds of hours on a model to compete at a Golden Demon, you could very easily do that and then find out that the entry isn’t eligible and then you’ll be disqualified, which again would be like a very big shame and kind of damages the competition a little bit as well.

In this Golden Demon, there were some discussions around custom models. Now I know this has been discussed before in previous Golden Demons, and so people will view this as a rules change, I feel, where you are not allowed to get third-party custom sculpts anymore. Now you are allowed to completely custom sculpt your own model. So if you are really good at sculpting, doesn’t matter if it’s with like green stuff or putty or whatever, or if you’re doing it digitally, as long as you’ve sculpted it yourself, that’s fine. And you can do that in any category.

What you can’t do is pay a professional sculptor to do a model for you. And if you do that, then the model will be disregarded in terms of trophies, which is a bit of a shame. But I’m not sure it was ever technically allowed- there was not comms that it was allowed. I think it was just a case of that some people started doing it and it wasn’t picked out. And then people just assumed, oh, that meant that you could do it, which kind of is fair because if Games Workshop are rewarding those models with trophies, then that’s kind of like they are endorsing having custom sculpts. But now they have made it kind of clear. I feel that the wording could be a bit more clear in the rules. But basically you cannot get third or buy third-party sculpts anymore to paint an entering the Golden Demon, which, you know, it’s either, it just depends on your perspective, whether it’s good or bad. I don’t particularly mind either way, although the custom sculpts do I feel give you a slight advantage because they can have an impact. Like if someone’s judging models and have seen Games Workshop models countless times over and over and over when you’ll see something that you’ve never seen before. The impact of having a like a completely unique sculpt would certainly give like an impact to the entry that maybe like a standard painted Games Workshop model wouldn’t necessarily have. And it’s just, you know, the painting is just like a nice bonus on top of the fact it’s like a very exciting individual sculpt. There were a few discussions on which models go in which category. And I feel this is partly due to because of the new categories being entered or like being available anyway in previous Golden Demons. So for example, if you have Underworlds now, it used to be that the Underworlds category didn’t exist, but the models from Underworlds would be used in Age of Sigmar unit and people do custom units, so like they pick models from various sources to create their unit. And quite often they would be Underworlds models because they tend to be a little bit more unique and like individual. So that means the same thing, but you get like a nice looking Underworlds model that would be almost like a unique character, but still part of a like whatever specific army that you could include in your unit and make it look a little bit more dynamic, and just maybe a bit more interesting to paint. And that was very common to do.

So what happened in this Golden Demon was some people were very specific and entered Underworlds models directly into the Underworlds category. In other cases, people would pick an individual Underworlds model and enter it in the single model category. It got a little bit confusing. Some models were just left in those categories they’d been entered in, and then other ones got moved. There were also a few specific things like if you entered Lord of the Rings, then the model can only be entered in the Lord of the Rings category. You can’t enter it into the other categories.

For example, one of the Lord of the Rings pieces was like the rat on the road with the whole bits hiding under like a little hole under some roots and things. That’s kind of like a diorama, I mean, it is a diorama. And obviously, you’ve got other Lord of the Rings single models. But what happened was somebody entered that particular scene into the diorama category and then entered the model into the Lord of the Rings one, and then they got kind of stuck because you can only enter Lord of the Rings into the Lord of the Rings category. Then one of those entries had to be discarded, which is also a bit of a shame. I think that needs to be quite specifically shown in the rules as well.

There is also something that was quite a hot topic, and that was the lighting in the cabinets. When you’re looking at the video here, I really don’t want you to judge the quality of the painting too much because you really can’t see how well some of these pieces are painted because the lighting was absolutely atrocious. It didn’t help that half of the room was open to outdoor lighting and the other half was quite heavily shadowed. Only the lighting from the room would, you know, a bit of bounce lighting from that. And on top of that, they had these obnoxious LEDs in the cabinets that were so bright. If you were near to any of the LEDs, you basically just could not see what the models were painted.

Things were underlit, so if you had like a type of painting that was more like source lighting, you know, top-down directional lighting, that kind of thing, then it would completely ruin how the model would be viewed. And it just made it so that it, well, it was just a really big shame I felt because people spend a lot of time on their entries. People come a long way to see entries that they’ve seen that have been painted and shown on social media, and they want to see them in person, and the cabinet lighting was so bad that it made it almost impossible to actually see what a lot of these models were like.

So, for me, it wasn’t such a big issue because I know many of the painters, and I could see the models up close in private. But for people going to the convention to the Golden Demon and they want to see these models, I just thought it was a really big shame. And in fact, I think it would’ve been better to actually turn the lights off in the cabinets and just let the daylight sort of diffuse in. Although it would be a bit darker, you’ll be able to see the models much more clearly at how they’re intended to be viewed.

I really do feel that Games Workshop needs to do something about the lighting in the cabinets. This, in particular, this Golden Demon, this was the worst lighting I’d ever seen. The UK one is not so bad, still not ideal, but definitely better than this. So, if there’s one thing I would really like to see improved, it would be that because that’s the point of going to the Golden Demon is you want to turn up and see everyone’s painted models. And in this case, the only people that are really getting to see these models are the judges, and like I know it’s a competition, and that’s really what counts. So you don’t have to worry if your model looks a bit rubbish under the lights or not, because when the judges look at it, they’ll look at it under proper painting light, they’ll see the correct colours, you know, you’ll see it how it’s supposed to be displayed anyway.

But for this, I don’t know, it was a really big disappointment to me anyway, and I’m sure a few other people. And I think that it’s also a bit frustrating as well because when you see some pro painters’ models, certain stars in particular, they will suffer very heavily under this kind of lighting. And then you’ll come over and you think, oh, why does it not look the same as when I saw it online? And it’s just such a really bad setting and a bad impression to give just all round, really.

So, a bit of a sore point for me. But overall though, the actual running of the Golden Demon, that was really good. Everything performed really well.

My Issue with the Awards

So what happens after all the judges finish their judging? The next day they have the award ceremony, which is quite exciting. All the people with commended entries get put into the room first. They are given priority seating at the front because obviously they all have to get up to go and collect their trophies. And I understand that the idea is everyone with a commended entry in a category now gets up in front of everyone, and then the awards are given from those people. That makes it very exciting and kind of shows how they’re all of a very high standard for the painting that they’ve done.

But from my perspective, from feedback I had from other people, it’s very daunting.

Not everyone’s incredibly confident in front of large numbers of people. Especially if you are in a group and you are the only person that doesn’t get a trophy. Because of the fewer entries in this particular Golden Demon, there were, in some cases, quite limited numbers of commended entries. And in some cases, in one category, there were only three commended entries. So those three people knew that they were guaranteed a trophy, which actually made it a lot easier for them because there was no concern about not getting a trophy.

In contrast, in some of the larger categories, there were more commended entries, like six or seven. So there would definitely be people standing up that didn’t get an award. And you have to do that in front of everyone. In one category, for example, there were four commended entries, so three of them would get an award, and then there’s one person left there on their own without anything. And I think that’s really kind of mean. I don’t think that is very encouraging to get people to participate because you are then stuck in front of everyone as the odd one out.

I also think it might be a little bit harsh on some of the younger participants because they’re a little bit younger and it’s not as easy for them to deal with a load of adults looking at them and then they don’t get a trophy. So I think maybe that could be looked at a little bit just to make everyone a bit more comfortable.

Overall, there were some really, really nice pieces at the Golden Demon. For example, the Slayer Sword piece by Alex was outstanding. I had a good feeling about that entry from quite early on because it was such a unique and creative idea. I’m really happy that he got the Slayer Sword because I think it was very well deserved.

I also had a few entries myself and was very happy to get a silver trophy in the Open competition. One of the really important things about Golden Demon is that you get to go and see the models in the flesh, which allows you to see how big some of them are. The problem I find sometimes with social media posts is that everything is the same size. For example, if you’ve got a Titan and someone else has a Lord of the Rings model, in the photos, they appear the same size, and of course, the larger piece will look more impressive because the detail is heavily packed into a small space. Whereas for the Lord of the Rings model, even though it’s a small picture on your phone, it’s still blown up large.

The small scale category was heavily entered and competitive, with fantastic entries. I think it was one of the biggest successes of the newer categories. While it’s not ideal for everyone in terms of painting because they are very heavily detailed and micro-detailed, it is good to have something like that because it’s unique compared to the other categories.

It was also interesting because there were a couple of people who entered single models into that category, like a model that’s two and a half millimeters tall, and they’ve edge-highlighted everything and picked out the eyes. It’s kind of ridiculous in those situations, but impressive that they still managed to get a commended entry with such a small model. Overall, it makes it kind of interesting to have such a broad range of models to see at Golden Demon.
And it’s definitely making it a more exciting competition.

Germany is the next Golden Demon and I’m not entirely sure whether I’m going yet or not, but I will be painting models with the intention of going.
Taking part in this Golden Demon was a really good experience for me and got me excited for future entries to see if I can compete with some of the new people entering Golden Demon, now!

Thank you very much for watching (or reading my transcript of the video!) and I’ll see you next time.

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